The Pentagon's tactical Internet - a war too early?
By John Lettice
Posted: 21/03/2003 at 20:44 GMT
The Pentagon is furiously buying up commercial satellite capacity in
order to meet the bandwidth needs of a new kind of IT-driven war,
reports the Washington Post. But
Register sources suggest that the US military has other, rather
larger problems in delivering on the digital battlespace vision.
A recent Department of Defense briefing included an
instructive illustration of the
growth in this hunger for bandwidth, and of what it is that the military
intends to do with it. Note that between the first Gulf war and Kosova
the requirement grew from 256Kbps to 1.5Mbps, and that the target for
2010 and beyond is 25Gbps in order to achieve "network centric
warfare", quite possibly with no soldiers at all needed on the
ground. We are currently somewhere beyond the "Web tools"
phase, but you'd probably be right if you reckoned that, despite the
existence of pioneering units in the military, the Pentagon spinners are
a couple of years ahead of themselves when they push the digitised
battlespace for this war.
We covered that here. The first unit
to be equipped with this technology, the 4th Infantry Division, was
originally intended for deployment in Turkey, northern Iraq invasion for
the use of, but as you may have heard there were problems with this.
Earlier this week it was still in Texas, with its equipment on ships in
the Eastern Med, so it will quite possibly miss this one.
The Abrams tank implementation of the digitized battlespace, the M1A2 SEP
(System Enhancement Package) is described
here, some of the salient points being "improved
processors, color and high resolution flat panel displays, increased
memory capacity, user friendly Soldier Machine Interface (SMI) and an
open operating system that will allow for future growth." The
objective of the digitized battlespace is to deliver systems whereby data
is gathered by individual units, communicated back to the centre in order
to produce a complete picture of the battlefield, and then this picture
is sent back to the individual units.
Thus, the commanders (who could conceivably be anywhere in the world)
have a clear picture of what's going on, and the troops on the ground
also know what's around them, which is friend and which is foe. But how
do you handle the comms?
Buying up bandwidth may help the Pentagon deal with some of the big
picture, but the current scramble is over bandwidth for less ambitious
but more profligate purposes. If you're going to sit on the other side of
the world controlling, say, an RQ-1 Predator UAV (Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle) that's sending you video, you must expect to be using a hell of
a lot of bandwidth. The Pentagon plans many more UAVs, and has lots
already deployed in Iraq - they chew up bandwidth, they do not produce a
joined up picture. So go figure. Also, note that UAVs were the stars of
the 4th's EXFOR tests a few years back - the 'Internet in a tank' didn't
figure highly at that point. They're arguably two different concepts, and
the one we're not currently excited about is the one that won the
wargame.
Aspects of the digitized battlespace clearly need a lot less bandwidth,
but this obviously mounts up when you equip a whole army with the
technology, and the weak link here is currently SINCGARS. Single Channel
Ground Airborne Radio System is the army's standard radio system, and
within the digitized battlespace is intended to route data messages via
the "Tactical Internet" which itself may be composed of
multiple SINCGARS radio nets. Other technologies, eg
WIN-T and JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio
System) will eventually start to build a functional Tactical Internet
(JTRS will begin deployment in 2005-6), but at the moment SINCGARS is
what's available.
In operation, this is a pretty narrow pipe. Even taking a fairly
conservative view of the comms requirements of the digitized battlespace
at client level, you find you need something in the region of a 1200 baud
modem connection. The actual data requirements are lower, but with the
addition of COMSEC and network management (obviously necessary), that's
what you come to. SINCGARS, however, is essentially old technology, a
voice system that can't seriously do the tactical Internet. For data it's
constrained to a single 25Khz voice channel, and other limitations force
it into approximately 3.5KHz available voice bandwidth.
So it's currently possible for units to know where they are via GPS, and
to report their position to commanders via their existing comms systems.
They can also do combat identification, reducing friendly fire
casualties, and the command centres now can at least get all of the data
they need to build a pretty accurate picture of where all of the friendly
units are; the big picture is possible because it has the available
bandwidth, the last mile is a lot trickier. And what it is that the
ground units are getting on those colour, high resolution flat panel
displays today rather difficult to conceive. Are we, perhaps, a war too
early? Maybe best stay in Texas this time around. �
Register apology
In our first take on the digitised battlespace, we recklessly claimed
that the equipment to do this was already being deployed, and that
therefore the gosh-wow stories were not entirely spin. We begin to
suspect that this was not the case.
